Patrick McGoohan, made famous by his role in bewildering 60s sci-fi escapology show The Prisoner, died on Tuesday, aged 80.

He was great in Danger Man, made his name in The Prisoner, then continued to deliver entertainment beyond the call of duty by directing and starring in numerous episodes of Columbo between the 1970s and his last directorial appearance in 2000.

Every Saturday we scan the satellite TV listings hoping a McGoohan-based episode of the shambling cop show will be on. And you can never go wrong watching him in Scanners. It is terribly sad news. He really didn't make enough films and TV shows considering his mesmerising acting skills.

Now, personally speaking, I'm quite a fan and active user of a wide and varied range of pornography - but I'm not so sure there's a need to watch it in 3D.

I don't like the idea of a man's belly and scrotum protruding into my lounge as he services the needs of a dishevelled-looking East European lady. That crosses a boundary. I want to feel emotionally detached. I don't want a starring role. I'd never be able to perform under that sort of pressure.

But that's precisely the sort of in-your-face and in-your-living-room approach to movie-watching being taken by Glacier Media Systems, with its Glacier Iceberg 3D entertainment system promising to bring your existing movie collection into 3D somehow, should you have a 3D capable HDTV.

Glacier offers a wide range of "3D Ready" media systems and PCs, starting from $1899. It will be showing off its range at the The 2009 AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, starting now in Vegas.

(Via The Shinettes)

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Whoa - this is awesome. Supersize a simple bottle rocket, and strap it to a terrified-looking Japanese bloke. The most impressive thing? The science involved, neatly summarised by PopSci. In short, this bloke leaves the launchpad at over 200MPH, experiencing acceleration of approx 10gs! Don't try this at home, kids.

PopSci (via Digg)

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Tetris. Always with the bloody Tetris. We've had Tetris ice cubes, Tetris chocolate, another kind of Tetris ice cubes, Tetris watches, Tetris furniture and even Tetris MADE REAL - now it's time for life-affirming Tetris making people better news.

Basically, some doctors have been using the timeless obsessive/compulsive block-tidying puzzle game to relieve the symptoms of stress sufferers. They found that playing Tetris 30 minutes after being exposed to harrowing imagery interrupts the brain's formation of memories, meaning you're less likely to suffer flashbacks to whatever horror porn the doctors were showing you - which could one day be used to reduce post-traumatic stress suffered by real people.

It's hardly news to us that concentrating really hard on one thing makes you forget about other things, though. It's actually extremely obvious. I was concentrating on writing this so much I forgot about the tea I made, for example. They must be student doctors. A bit wet under the collar.

(Via BBC)

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Demand a toilet AND underpants in one handy device? The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency has got it covered!

The clichéd slightly wacky Japanese scientists have built the amazing below gadget, which could eliminate toilet trips for good. Poo and wee are sucked out by a pump, with a built-in washer/dryer system cleaning up the resulting mess, leaving you relaxed, fresh and dry. It's genius. Especially if the suction pump also comes with optional 'entertainment' attachments.

Might not be the most comfortable thing to wear about the place, but it'll definitely find itself a niche among Warcraft players, where abandoning your guild members to take a toilet break is a sign of weakness and dishonour.

(Via Akihabara)

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The UK's warship fleet is getting itself an update, with versions of worst-windows-ever Windows 2000 and best-windows-ever XP rolling out across the fleet.

First to replace its ageing custom software with the "new" Windows operating systems is the HMS Montrose, which will soon enter a refitting phase where its old kit will be replaced by standard PCs.

Technology previously used to treat Parkinson's Disease has been directed elsewhere. Scientists claim to have developed a chip that can be implanted into the brain and used to deliver "feelings of pleasure".

The target of the chip is the Orbitofrontal Cortex. Just behind the eyes, it's the bit of your noggin that's associated with pleasure derived from food and sex. The implementation is still a bit clunky at the moment - you have to run a wire from the chip in the brain to a heart pacemaker, which I imagine isn't too comfortable. Neurosurgery professor Tipu Aziz, said:

"There is evidence that this chip will work. A few years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn't like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed."

(via the Telegraph)

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The modernist regime of Estonia is EMBRACING the inexorable decline of future society and the eventual eradication of all vowels by allowing its citizens to vote via TXT MSG in the country's 2011 general election.

It's not quite as easy as simply texting in your choice of leader and an emoticon, though - all would-be text voters will need a special security-enabled SIM card to validate their identity and ensure there's no funny business before vote day. So it still involves a fair bit of inconvenience and legwork, but is at least several times better than the current UK system of traipsing to your local primary school with a post card like it's still the 1950s.

Estonia is already miles ahead of the UK and every other country in the world, thanks to an existing scheme which allowed people to vote in its parliamentary elections via the internet last year. Estonia also seems to beat us in having the most frequent elections.

(Via BGR - pic made with the ever-amusing TXT2Pic)

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Before you get too excited, we're not talking about keeping the Borg in the brig here. However, scientists have developed a gadget called "Envirostat", which will allow them to keep individual cells in a force field of sorts. That means that they can assess the individual cell response to a single variable, while other conditions are kept stable.

The application is in the development of drugs and biofuels, where scientists want to be able to assess the impact of adding something, without feedback mechanisms clouding the response. Still, if you're an amoeba with enemies, I'd watch out if I were you. Video of the tech in action over the jump.

A 16 year study that involved staring at the stars for ages and everyone getting very, very cold, has discovered that there's pretty much definitely a massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

Minor fluctuations spotted in the movements of stars have, apparently, signalled to people who understand this sort of stuff, that an object with four million times the mass of our Sun must be sitting there exerting its gravitational pull over all nearby stars.

We now have "the best empirical evidence that super-massive black holes do really exist" according to project leader Professor Reinhard Genzel, from the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.

So that's why the sky is black at night. Seems so obvious now with the benefit of hindsight.

(Via PA)

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A survey conducted by the Royal National Institute for Deaf People discovered that two-thirds of us are listening to MP3 players at dangerously loud volume levels that could break our earholes for good.

The RNID accosted 246 people in the streets of Edinburgh and plugged listening gadgets into the headphone sockets of their MP3 players, testing the volume output levels. The level considered safe for blasting music into the human head is an equivalent output of 85 decibels - but the RNID found that 22% of the people it asked had their 'phones cranked up to more than 100.

If you live in or near the odd fringe area of society where it's acceptable behaviour to spend six hours pacing up and down a beach in the hope of finding a 5p coin someone dropped yesterday and couldn't be bothered bending down to pick up - THIS IS FOR YOU.

Only joking - metal detectors are awesome. The idea of spending a whole day methodically covering a surface area the size of three football pitches in the hope of finding some old Roman coins, a bit of a crashed Spitfire or just a rusted piece of old farm machinery is extremely attractive. You get to be alone, outside, with the promise of making an exciting discovery. That's a win, win, win scenario.

Plus the Discriminating Metal Detector promises to, as you may have just guessed, tell the difference between nine different types of metal, so you won't waste as much time digging up Coke cans and nails and can concentrate fully on bagging the £75k-worth of gold coins that have lain undiscovered for 2000 years.

Yours for $200 from here when they get more stock - it'll pay for itself in a weekend.

(Via OhGizmo)

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You may or may not have witnessed the miracle that is Golden Shellback's magical waterproof coating. If you haven't, then witness it below.

Witnessed? Good. Well, the wonderful news is that the service is now officially available for the typical cost as outlined after the jump.

You wouldn't think people would ever be pleased to hear they can start drinking their own urine - but the astronauts on the International Space Station are currently over the moon about it.

"There will be dancing later," Mission Control said, after ISS commander Mike Fincke told Earth the orbiting station's faulty water processor - which turns space wee, condensation and SWEAT into lovely drinking water - was fixed.

This raises two important questions - how do you dance in zero gravity? And before the urine-processor was fixed, were the poor astronauts forced to drink raw, unprocessed urine? Our boyhood dreams of going into space have been RUINED, regardless.

Hopefully the machine that turns poo into Mars bars won't break.

(Via USA Today)

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This beautiful cloud represents the entirety of music. Every single artist tracked by Last.fm is marked as a point on the map, and 'similar' artists are connected by a grey line. The size of each point reflects the popularity of the artist, and different colours represent different genres.

It's the creation of Budapest University PhD candidate Nepusz Tamas, who hammered Last.FM's servers for over a week with a request every five seconds. Unfortunately, the only way to interact with the map is to pinpoint your favourite bands, and you can't zoom in, but it's still a beautiful representation of the world's listening habits.

Reconstructing the structure of the world-wide music scene with Last.fm (via Listening Post)

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What's "tens" of nanometres thin, contains no moving parts, and blasts out Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" all day long? Carbon nanotube speakers developed by researchers at China's Tsinghua University, that's what.

The researchers have found a way to get ridiculously thin films of nanotubes to transmit sound. They don't move, or vibrate, instead the pressure waves are generated by temperature fluctuations across the surface. This means that even when bent, moving, or damaged, the sound is still perfect.

San Francisco-based artist Tanya Vlach lost an eye in a car accident in 2006 - now she's planning to replace her standard-issue fake eye with a webcam. Preferably wireless - and with a 3x zoom. And infra-red support so she can see what she does in the dark.

Here's what Tanya asked for in an advert she placed for a suitable technician for the job...

"I am attempting to recreate my eye with the help of a miniature camera implant in my prosthetic / artificial eye. The intraocular installation of an eye-cam will substitute for the field of vision of my left eye that I lost in 2005 from a car accident. While my prosthetic is an excellent aesthetic replacement, I am interested in capitalizing on the current advancement of technology to enhance the abilities of my prosthesis for an augmented reality."

One of her crazier requests is for the eye-cam to include support for taking photos by recognising her blinking patterns, with a built-in miniSD card slot for storage. Consider us Day One subscribers to TanyaCam's Flickr feed.

(Via LikeCool)

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Turns out that fixing the slight liquid helium leak down below Geneva earlier this year is going to cost rather more than the vase you knocked over at Auntie Flo's house when you were 13, which cost you all your pocket money for the following three months. To be precise, the exact cost of fixing the LHC is £14 million.

The team behind it also say that "realistically", it's going to take until next summer before things are up and running again. Originally, we thought that it'd be going again around now, but the damage was more severe than the team realised. Most concerningly of all, the cost of fixing the thing 'falls within CERN's budget'. Damn - that's one hell of a budget.

LHC (via BBC)

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Today's energy saving tip is to do with the vacuum cleaner. The common 'Hoover' is a massive drain of electricity, regularly sucking up POUNDS AND POUNDS worth of your electricity and therefore also the very fabric of planet Earth. But! You can stop this from happening! You can vacuum AND SAVE!

Watch my exclusive video on making your own, free, energy efficient vacuum cleaner out of household equipment to learn how...

You are not allowed to steal this idea. It is MY IDEA. I've emailed a rough outline of the concept to Sir James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner tycoon, asking for a few million to aid in its commercial development. I also cc-ed in Trevor Bayliss, as it's also the sort of thing he might be interested in selling to developing countries.

I will soon be known as The Other Vacuum Cleaner Tycoon.

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It is a bit of a shame and quite an embarrassment for mankind that batteries haven't come on in leaps or bounds since the 1970s, with modern Duracells only being marginally better than the Duracells used to power a Big-Trak for about 35 minutes on Christmas Day, 1981.

But that might possibly be about to change - thanks to a man called Prof. Cho Jae-phil who works at the Department of Applied Chemistry at Hanyang University, in South Korea...